Award Data

Pressure gain combustion has the potential to significantly improve the specific fuel consumption for gas turbine engines by realizing a pressure rise through the combustor as opposed to a pressure drop. One drawback to this form of combustion is the cycl

Pressure gain combustion (PGC) offers means to a more efficient energy use in propulsion and power generation devices. Integrating PGC concepts in gas turbine engines often results in highly unsteady flow conditions at turbine inlet. Further, the backpres

Genome-scale predictable cellular design and engineering of biomanufacturing systems is the overarching a goal of DARPA's Living Foundry thrust and, if realized, will enable rapid engineering of living biosystems for a broad range of applications in biotechnology and pharmacology. However, constructing living cells with designed genome is not fully automated and is severely limited by inhere ...

HJ Science & Technology (HJS & T) and the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) propose to develop an automated, software-controlled, programmable, low-cost, and compact platform capable of running rapid and complex bioengineering processes and optimization of new biomanufacturing systems. Our approach combines the microfluidic automation technology of HJS & T with the novel synthetic biology technolo ...

This proposal is to develop a new system for Recognition of Communities and Heterogeneous Analysis of Group Interactions and Dynamics (RC-HAGID) for Social Media Forecasting. Social media enables individuals and groups to quickly coordinate, recruit and direct people to take action in support of a particular objective. This includes terrorist groups and criminal organizations. Accordingly, for ...

The increasing use of video in force protection, autonomous vehicles reconnaissance, and surveillance in general has created a great demand for automated analysis and monitoring. It is infeasible to have humans monitoring and analyzing the vast amount of video used in such surveillance, and automated analysis yields hope to ease the burden and increase the amount of information extracted from col ...

The challenges faced by airborne and ground-based sensors in detecting, classifying, identifying, associating and tracking difficult moving targets, such as insurgent forces, operating in difficult terrain such as mountains and forests will be addressed. Our team will quantify the performance that can be achieved using multi-sensor, multi-spectral, and multi-platform techniques, where the sensors ...

Early detection of virulent infectious pathogens is critical to blocking the devastating epidemic spread of the pathogen and the potential harm this could have on our armed forces and general populations. In Phase I, we have utilized the state-of-the-art QuantiGene 2.0 technology to establish an assay for the sensitive quantification of SARS (epidemic spread in 2001) and assessing plasma DNA level ...

In this Phase II proposal, the main thrust is to build a hardware MCICD prototype, and validate the FAR/FNR through real vehicle testing. By leveraging the existing LADAR based sensing platform in CMU, we expect to shorten the development cycle and reduce the overall cost. Extensive real vehicle testing is expected both in staged scenarios and in normal traffic. In this Phase II program, we also p ...

The development of compact, ultra-low drive voltage optical phase modulators is a critical key component for passive antenna remoting applications, a strategic area, part of a number of current and upcoming DARPA initiatives. With the development of sufficiently low V-pi modulators, passive front-ends can be constructed with a low figure even for a moderate optical pumping power. The combination o ...